The woman makes a signal to the guards, who shoulder their rifles and aim them at the line of prisoners, women and children, newborn baby in the arms of his big brother.
Nobody moves. Nobody makes a sound, not even Claire. The shock is too great, the knowledge of instant death paralyzes them all. Iris feels the universe shrink and expand around her. Her flesh anticipates the thud of bullets and the spray of blood. She sees—no, not her life passing before her, but everything all at once—Sasha and Philip, the children, Ruth, Harry, her parents, all gathered into a single soul, like a star. She croaks out a soundless NO.
The woman opens her mouth and says, “—or exile.”
From the beach behind them comes another sound—a voice.
Ruth turns first, then the children, then Iris. A pair of men brace themselves in the sand, about a hundred yards away, illuminated by a sliver of moon. Behind them, a large rowboat rests on the ebbing tide.
“Go,” the woman says, in English.
Ruth
July 1952
Baltic Sea
The sun is just beginning to rise when we reach the fishing trawler.
Trawlers are the most unlovely things afloat, in my opinion—dirty white and clumsy as a gravid rhinoceros. But this one is perhaps the most beautiful craft I have seen in my life, all bathed in the fine pink otherworldly glow of a breaking dawn.
Everyone in the rowboat is stupefied, except the girl Marina. She sits in the stern and silently weeps. I only know this because I turned around once, during the journey across the fidgety, chopping waves, and saw the trails of tears along her cheeks. At one point, Kip tried to climb back and console her, but she shook her head and he stopped in his tracks. Sat back down and faced forward. I guess they understand each other, those two—like me and Fox.
The trawler is well out to sea, and it requires almost three hours of hard pulling on the part of those two sailors before we meet. All this time I’ve been pushing back any thought of Fox—or of Digby, for that matter—but especially Fox. It helps that my hands are full, keeping Claire from climbing over the side of the rowboat, trading off Gregory with Kip, checking anxiously on Iris, who curls at my feet, propped against the curving side of the boat, burning hot and restless, while Fox’s image clamors painfully at the back of my head. Three such hours can make anything look beautiful.
As we approach, one of the sailors hails the trawler. I don’t think it’s necessary. A rope ladder already hangs down the side, and a man stands there as though he’s prepared to dive in at the slightest signal. For an instant I imagine it’s Sumner Fox, by some extraordinary miracle on a night of miracles. I can almost see his big shoulders—his rough face soaked in sunrise. But as we draw nearer, my imagination dies away. These shoulders are no more than sturdy; the face is not as broad or as coarse; one side is marked with terrible scars, where he hasn’t got much of an ear left. He leans forward to catch the rope tossed up by the sailor, and his hair catches the light—pink and gold as the dawn itself.
One by one, the children go up the ladder and into the man’s arms. The boys seem to recognize him—Jack makes a squeal. Marina climbs carefully and doesn’t say a word of thanks. Then Claire goes up. He catches her tenderly and says something to her that makes her laugh. Her feet hit the deck and she scampers out of sight.
Now it’s my turn. I clamber forward on the rocking boat and hand up the baby to this man. He scoops Gregory like a man who’s held a newborn in his time—one hand supporting the head, the other under the bottom—and comforts him while I climb the rope ladder and stagger to the deck.
“You must be Ruth,” the scarred man says.
Without the scars, he might be handsome—you can’t tell. Without the white hair, he might be a young man—again, there’s no telling. He has the eyes of someone who has lived too much and too long, but the trim, taut figure of someone who lives ferociously in the present. The sunlight makes a nimbus around him and the baby in his arms. All this I gather in an instant, because there is not an instant to lose. I hold out my hands for Gregory. “I am.”
You know, I don’t think he even sees me, really. He puts the baby in my arms and says hastily, “Philip Beauchamp. You’ll excuse me.”
I step away from the opening on the rail. From below, one sailor supports Iris around the waist while she puts her hands and feet on the rungs of rope. The man named Beauchamp goes down on his knees and then his belly and reaches down to take my sister in his arms. He hauls her carefully to the deck and cradles her as you might cradle a child. The new sunshine coats them both. He pushes away some hair from her forehead and shouts out for the medical kit.
Iris looks for me. “The bag!” she gasps out. “Gregory’s bag.”
I look back at the rowboat, where the valise sits, forlorn and forgotten, in the very peak of the bow, because nobody wanted to sit near it—reeking as it does. Gregory stirs in my arms and lets out a lusty cry.
Because I am numb with sorrow, revelation steals over me quietly, like a thief.
Lord Almighty. The football.
And I laugh—giggles at first, then giant, hysterical whoops that shock Gregory into silence and cause everyone in the trawler to stare at me as if I’m crazy. Maybe I am. Are we not still surrounded by misery and death? Does my heart not groan in anguish for what we left behind? Still, I laugh. I can’t seem to help myself.
Sumner Fox’s final handoff, across the goal at last.
Before I fit the baby into the crook of my elbow and reach down with one hand to take the bag from the sailor, I kiss my sister on the cheek. She’s the only one left in the world who understands.
Four
Every man is hung upon the cross of himself.
—Whittaker Chambers
Iris
August 1952
Dorset, England
After breakfast every morning, Iris settles Gregory into the enormous Silver Cross perambulator and heads out across the lawn and the meadow until the Channel breeze comes out of nowhere to tumble her hair and wash her cheeks and fill her lungs. Then she sits in the grass with her sketchbook and fills the crisp, new pages with drawings.
The perambulator was a gift from Philip, along with the nurse who tends Gregory during the middle of the night so Iris can rest. To say nothing of Honeysuckle Cottage itself—dear, crumbling bricks and climbing vines, like coming home! Philip—reading her mind as always—said it would be easier for the boys if they stay in the cottage, in their old familiar bedrooms, instead of Highcliffe. Even Mrs. Betts has returned to their lives. Philip hired her to look after Honeysuckle Cottage when the Digbys disappeared, and between Mrs. Betts and Ruth and the nurse, everything runs to the beat of some invisible clock, so Iris hardly has to lift a finger. Even if she wants to.
“When you’re strong again . . .” Ruth says, from the grass beside her.
“I am strong. I’m all better.”
“Thanks to good capitalist penicillin. Anyway, you’ve earned a holiday. Who would’ve thought my little pumpkin could break up an international spy ring?”
The sea air is good for everyone, even Gregory. Iris peers over the edge of the pram to check on him. He slumbers on, motionless—two small, perfect hands on either side of his small, perfect head. Iris gazes in rapture at the tufts of pale hair, the apple curve of his cheek, the outline of his long, bowed legs under the blanket. A part of her wants to answer Ruth’s argument—to explain that she was never really the little pumpkin of Ruth’s imagination, that the sisterhood is not divided neatly into adventuresome Ruths and retiring Irises, that bravery is woven from all kinds of different fabric and maybe hers is actually the more tough, the more durable. But this story is so important to Ruth—the story of Ruth forever coming to the rescue of a delicate Iris—so she returns to her drawing and doesn’t say a word.
“What are you sketching this morning?” Ruth asks.
“Oh, nothing much.”
“May I see?”
Iris turns the sketchbook so Ruth can see the page.